Posts from Green Living

Lets get real here: Anything you can do with a small piece of wood, you can do with a wooden cutting board. It's a pretty versatile thing in the realm of re-purposing. In case you need a little jump start on some ideas, here are 10 examples and projects to inspire you.

Cast iron skillets get better with age- as long as you're consistently cooking with them, and as long as you don't clean them with soap. If it's been ages since you've actually used your skillet, chances are it's in need of some TLC. Covered in rust, you say? No problem! Reach for these three simple kitchen staples to help you return your pan to its former glory.

Now that the high temps have really kicked in, it's hard to remember that this is the season everyone longs for during the darker, colder months of the year. Ha! If your home doesn't have AC (or you are choosing to leave it off as much as possible) you can feel stuck, especially when it comes to getting a restful night's sleep.

Welcome to Doug Scott from Redeem Your Ground, a landscape designer, blogger, husband, and father of two young daughters from Atlanta. This is the first in a series of posts he'll share this month on basic gardening and how to create beautiful and meaningful outdoor spaces.

My dad’s a physician and words like "stat" and "triage" were used on a fairly regular basis while I was growing up. So when I started our landscape design business, performing a "backyard triage" at the beginning of a client project seemed to make a lot of sense. After all, like triage in an emergency room, it's about prioritizing your efforts to increase the chances of bringing life to a threatened or otherwise lifeless space.

Here's an oldy but a goody that's even more relevant now as MORE people are doing it... I recently bought my first pair of "serious" jeans. The reason I know this is because as I was standing at the register about to pay A LOT of money for them, a cool dude who was standing next to me at the register said, "Oh, you're going to like those." "Do you have a pair?" I asked him. "Nope," he said, "But you're going to like those." I felt like a first time drug buyer or as if I was buying a Ferrari, not a pair of jeans. And then he said, "And remember, don't wash them."

For anyone who's ever scrounged around in their bag for a stray pen, this is for you. This strap can be wrapped around a journal, planner, or other book, and it's fitted with small loops for carrying pens, pencils, and other handy tools. Handmade using reclaimed rubber and elastic. From Cleverhands: "Some time ago I made a journal bandolier for myself. After the 8th person asked me where they could get one it occurred to me that I wasn't the only person sick of losing pens and breaking pencil points, or having inspiration hit only to find I had nothing to draw or write with!"

Strap is 2" wide. Loop is 5.75"L when flat. Fits easily around books that run a little over 5 inches wide. Each loop is approximately 1 inch wide. There are a total of 7 loops.

The perfect stove for the camper or outdoorsman, this rocket stove is an economical but highly effective way to cook off-grid. It requires very little wood, retains heat exceptionally well, and produces minimal smoke. It also is part of a bigger mission: "StoveTec’s mission is to deliver clean and efficient cook stoves to the nearly 3 billion people that currently cook over an open fire or an unimproved cook stove. 1.6 million people, 85% of which are women and children, die every year from inhaling the smoke emitted by open fires or unimproved cook stoves."

We're probably not the first to tell you that bees have been disappearing from their hives, never to return, at alarming rates. Colony Collapse Disorder has been an issue here in the US since the 1990s and it's now occurring all around the world. Among the super-bummer factors believed to be causing CCD is habitat loss. While this is a really large scale issue, there are a few things the average gardener can do to help out.